Beaufort Water Festival starts Friday after last-minute scare. Here’s 5 changes
Just 11 days before the start of this year’s Beaufort Water Festival on the Beaufort River, Todd Stowe was staring at a curve ball: The city was closing the park’s promenade for safety reasons.
The very same promenade that has served as the festival’s centerpiece for nearly 50 years.
“It’s more like a fastball to the face,” Stowe said Tuesday.
Stowe is this year’ festival commodore, the person in charge of the 10-day extravaganza celebrating the Beaufort’s idyllic location, lifestyle and history on the water that attracts some 70,000 people each year to the water’s edge.
After some 11th-hour handwringing, Beaufort’s favorite past-time is returning for a 69th year. Based on the advice of its engineers, the city ended up concluding that the long-standing festival could safely handle the influx of people because most of the 5-acre park was built on dirt and fill. The 35-foot-wide, 1,200-foot-long promenade, however, is supported by concrete pilings that are falling apart due to years of wear-and-tear in marine conditions.
The promenade closure still forced Stowe and his Water Festival team to quickly pivot, which has resulted in a few changes that Stowe says the public will notice but will keep the festival largely unchanged.
“I have a good crew that’s fast on its feet,” Stowe says.
The fun begins on Friday
The festival begins Friday and runs through July 20.
As usual, the 2025 festival, which is so well known in the Lowcountry it has its own vehicle vanity plates, will include the famous Lowcountry Supper featuring the regional seafood staple known as the “Lowcountry Boil.” And once again nightly music in Waterfront Park will return, including headlining country singer Chris Janson (“Buy Me a Boat”), tribute bands to classic 1980s-era bands Bon Jovi, Motley Crue and Journey and Atlanta reggae band Ragga Lox.
Tickets are available online only.
The blessing of the boat fleet will be back, too, although the priest, who can’t stand on the promenade, will be forced to climb an 8-foot-high platform to do the job and may have to toss the holy water farther than usual.
It will be the first time since Waterfront Park was constructed in the last 1970s that the promenade will be closed, Stowe said. The festival usually attracts about 70,000 people over 10 days. This year, festival organizers are required to reduce the amount of tickets sold inside the park by 10%, Stowe said.
While the summer festival will proceed, you can expect a few changes including these five:
1. New raft race location
Saturday’s wild white water raft race, which usually proceeds along the promenade before cheering fans, has been moved to Sands Beach in Port Royal, which agreed to lend a hand to its neighbor to the north.
2. New toad tourney location
Saturday’s children’s toad fishing tournament will be moved from the day dock area near the park closest to the Woods Memorial Bridge to the boat launch on the other end of the park.
3. New Lowcountry supper entrance
The popular Lowcountry Supper, the traditional meal of shrimp, corn, sausage and potatoes, variously called Frogmore Stew, Beaufort Stew or Lowcountry Boil, will be held once again on July 17 but the entrance is changing. People will begin lining up near the clock on Bay Street. They will enter the supper near Panini’s on the Waterfront. The supper will be served under the pavilion.
4. New way to enjoy music acts
TVs and speakers will be set up in the contemplative gardens so families can watch the music acts performing in the nearby pavilion.
5. Blessing of the fleet will change
Usually, boats parade past the promenade as people stand on the promenade and watch and a reverend from St. Peter’s Catholic Church performs a blessing, sprinkling holy water on the vessels as they pass. With the promenade closed to the public, that won’t be possible but the blessing of the fleet is still scheduled. Stowe says the public will need to stand farther back but they still will be able to see the boats as they pass because it will occur at high tide. Also, organizers plan to build an 8-foot-tall scaffolding platform so the priest will be able to perform the blessing, he said.
Unflappable commodore
Stowe seemed unflappable as he discussed the massive effort it takes to coordinate the 400 volunteers who work with seemingly military precision to pull the Water Festival together year after year, especially in 2025 when the public wondered whether the city’s marquee summer show would even be possible.
“It was definitely unexpected,” Stowe says of the promenade closure in the air-conditioned headquarters of the festival headquarters just off off Bay Street, where the walls are adorned with the unique renderings that accompany each festival including 2025, when the theme is “Blue Skies and Starry Nights.”
Stowe’s crew includes 10 coordinators who oversee the hundreds of volunteers. Stowe compares how the festival is run to a large business. The coordinators are like department heads who are in charge of a variety of duties ranging from advertising to production. They’re good at it.
“We’ve done it a few times,” he says.
People sometimes ask him, as commodore, “I bet you are going crazy” because of the huge task but Stowe says the role of program coordinator, the No. 2, is most stressful. This year Dusty Vickers has the job. Stowe had it last year.
“Last year I was saying, ‘”June was a long year,’” Stowe says.
Per tradition, last year’s festival board of director’s selected the 2025 commodore at the close of the 2024 event and the selection was the 56-year-old Stowe, a long-time public school teacher who has been helping the city put on water festivals since 1995.
“It’s a small pond but you’re a big fish,” he says of the revered commodore’s position.
He was actually a little sad he was chosen, he said, “because once you’re commodore, they pretty much put you out to pasture.”
Water Festival ‘is my something’
Stowe moved to Beaufort in 1994 after graduating from the University of Georgia. He had been in town one year when Mike Rentz, a Beaufort High School teacher and football coach who has since passed, came calling about the Water Festival. “He said, ‘You want to volunteer? You get a free shirt.’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’”
Working on the Water Festival helps scratch his itch for volunteering, says Stowe, who also has been on many mission trips with his church, Beaufort Baptist. “Everybody’s got something,” he says. “This is my something. I’ve got a lot of karma to make up for.”
Every year of the water festival organizers inevitably face a curve ball, Stowe says. It might be band that makes a special request for space or power. It might be a new sporting event, or cutting one. But rarely do the changes come less than two weeks prior to the start of the festival, Stowe said.
“You have to roll with it,” he says.
This story was originally published July 8, 2025 at 3:12 PM.
